[4] Fleck's goal for this discussion was to situate the discovery of new scientific facts, a form of epistemological cognition, within the greater environment of knowledge that encompasses them.
He promotes with the idea of the "Denkkollektiv" the tenet that any discovery is an interaction between at least three things, namely the discovered phenomenon, the discoverer, and the existing pool of knowledge from which they draw.
Just as a soccer player makes little progress in a game without their interactions among a cooperating team, an individual researcher is lost without the thought collective that shapes their approach to scientific practice.
Extending this analogy, ideas and concepts exchange between individuals in the thought collective like passes in a soccer match, each time gaining new directions and a change in momentum.
With the greater collective and style of practice taken into account, scientific discoveries can be considered as communal social products influenced by the particular milieu that surrounds them.